When she was finally allowed to visit her father, she found him in a wheelchair, wearing a diaper. A prison guard took notes throughout the 30-minute encounter, which took place in a small, barren room, through a plate of thick, transparent plastic. It was, for her, a dream come true, but yet a nightmare.
Sitting on the other side of the glass was Shoko Asahara. With his arrest and trial, the teenager had gone from obscurity to being the daughter of Japan's most hated man.
Asahara was sentenced to hang for trying to bring down the government in an elaborate scheme to hasten Armageddon with a series of violent crimes culminating in a nerve-gas attack on Tokyo's subways that killed 12 people and sickened 5,000 more on March 20, 1995. His arrest was seen live on television as a phalanx of riot police marched on his Aum Shinrikyo fortress at the base of Mount Fuji. The spectacle remains etched in the nation's collective memory.